A short business trip to Kenya extended to the lovely African Savannahs of Masai Mara. You can figure the camera was bad. But the experience is undesribable. Poetry and musings may better elaborate the heaven I've been through. I would urge everyone of you reading this to plan a trip to the Masai soon. You'll come back a changed person.

A late evening dinner with extended family. Someone was fickle minded about having a lasik surgery done because of the risks google suggested. Ofcourse, at the end of the day- it IS a cosmetic surgery. Why take even a 1% risk?

A doctor, happened to be on panel.

Said it's true. But the bias has occupied mind space to an extent of disturbing extrapolition.

Okay, so here's some snapshots of the wall in my room
(Like Randy Pausch in the Last Lecture, I've been a big fan of scribbling things on my wall, even until the tender age of 26. And then my mom found out. I had to set up a canvas)

Read some interesting stuff that I've penned down (or pinned up) over the years :)

I need the sea because it teaches me, I don’t know if I learn music or awareness, if it’s a single wave or its vast existence, or only its harsh voice or its shining suggestion of fishes and ships. The fact is that until I fall asleep, in some magnetic way I move in the university of the waves.-Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was deeply in love with the sea. It is easily reflected in his poems, as well his lavish avant-garde homes that face the sea, are decked with wood and provide the ambiance of being on ship.

Who in the world does not love the sea(except those who get sea sick?)

The Varq Restaurant at Taj Mansingh Hotel, Delhi may be defined as my own personal epicurean epicenter, for I crave to visit it any and every chance I'd get. Of course, this is not the only place which brings that epic epiphany relating to the existence of the the mastery in culinary arts, but still, it just served as a good example to start off with this blog post.

We are all aware (I hope) of the nasal role played in our food tasting experience. So, talking about the five senses, we may cross off the olfactory and gustatory ones. The tactile one is also of prime importance as can be heard in the phrase "Maa ke haath ka khana" (the food prepared by the mother). The conclusion arrived at from a related cocktail discussion was that there is some sort of an energy that is transferred from your finger tips to your food when you eat with your hands (now, don't blame me for going against table manners).

But I wanted to go beyond the somewhat obvious inferences. How far can our visual and auditory senses affect our eating experience?

Casual talks at late night parties. Everyone loves talking about Elon. That's what leaders are. Topics of conversation. Here's a starter. Heard it at a similar party.Walt Disney didn't live to see the Disney World. He died 5 years before it opened. On the day the Florida park opened, someone commented to Mike, the creative director, "Isn't it too bad Walt Disney didn't live to see this?""He did see it" Vance replied, "That's why it's here".text ref. What Leaders Do: A Leadership Primer (By Dave Browning)

Ummm, chargers are a messy business (including those wireless ones, sigh!). Specially those which are specially made for special devices.

Yes, I am looking at you, Philips trimmers (and shavers and all things similar). You know, I totally understand your business idea. Sell the whole set for some 1500 bucks and sell spare chargers for some 1000 ones. Fools like me would go for a new set, and fools unlike me would hand you over 1000 bucks anyway.

As we welcome International Yoga Day into its third year, I would like to thank the Surya Namaskar for helping me get along with my quarter life crisis with relative ease.

When I was 6 odd years old, some astrologer dude told me to look at the Sun daily and say "Om Surya Namaha" 12 times. Somehow the habit stuck. But it wasn't until recently that I looked up the actual names of the sun, and the meanings and the yoga postures associated with it.

But am I glad I did that during my early 20s. Yes, I know how you, me and we all feel at this age.

Doubtful about what we want, what we just did, and what we're going to do. Where is the impact we were supposed to create? Weren't we supposed to make a difference? Either stuck in a job where the growth seems impossibly harder than we thought or still figuring out what do with our underrated lives.
But the stories we used to read, and our parents, teachers, didn't they always say that we were special? (Heck, my parents even named me विशेष). We can't even compare to our over achiever parents when they were 25, let alone friends of our age!
Should we go for a debt-inviting MBA? Can we just quit and travel the
world, hitchhiking? Or should we just go to the Himalayas and settle
down as an ascetic? Or let's just take our non-paying passion full time! And passion, where is passion in our ever failing relationships? Constant questioning if we really want
to be with this person long-term — and maybe even debating whether it's
too late to find someone else. Failed searches for the right one, failed attempts to sustain the right one.

Being a twenty something is indeed scary. The Depression Alliance estimates that a third of twenty somethings feel depressed.

"If, as we're constantly told, the world is our oyster, it's
definitely a dodgy one. Unlike the midlife crisis, the quarter life
crisis is not widely recognized. There are no 'experts' to help us. We
have no support apart from each other."

Damian Barr, author of the book Get it Together: A Guide to Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis

So here's my attempt at supporting a troubled fellow.

My perceptions and understandings about this wonderful meditative practice, called the Surya Namaskar; and why we should imbibe them.